- Chertok, Boris E.
Rockets and People. Vol. 2.
Washington: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, [1999] 2006.
ISBN 978-1-4700-1508-4 NASA SP-2006-4110.
-
This is the second book of the author's
four-volume autobiographical history of the Soviet missile
and space program.
Boris Chertok
was a survivor, living through the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian
civil war, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, World War II, all of the
postwar conflict between chief designers and their bureaux and rival
politicians, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Born in Poland in
1912, he died in 2011 in Moscow. After retiring from the RKK Energia
organisation in 1992 at the age of 80, he wrote this work between 1994
and 1999. Originally published in Russian in 1999, this annotated
English translation was prepared by the NASA History Office under the
direction of Asif A. Siddiqi, author of
Challenge to Apollo (April 2008),
the definitive Western history of the Soviet space
program.
Volume 2 of Chertok's chronicle begins with his return from
Germany to the Soviet Union, where he discovers, to his dismay,
that day-to-day life in the victorious workers' state is
much harder than in the land of the defeated fascist enemy. He
becomes part of the project, mandated by Stalin, to first
launch captured German V-2 missiles and then produce an exact
Soviet copy, designated the
R-1.
Chertok and his colleagues discover that making a copy of
foreign technology may be more difficult than developing it
from scratch—the V-2 used a multitude of steel and non-ferrous
metal alloys, as well as numerous non-metallic components (seals,
gaskets, insulation, etc.) which were not produced by Soviet
industry. But without the experience of the German rocket team
(which, by this time, was in the United States), there was no
way to know whether the choice of a particular material was
because its properties were essential to its function or
simply because it was readily available in Germany. Thus,
making an “exact copy” involved numerous difficult
judgement calls where the designers had to weigh the risk of
deviation from the German design against the cost of standing up
a Soviet manufacturing capacity which might prove unnecessary.
After the difficult start which is the rule for missile projects,
the Soviets managed to turn the R-1 into a reliable missile and,
through patience and painstaking analysis of telemetry, solved a
mystery which had baffled the Germans: why between 10% and 20% of
V-2 warheads had detonated in a useless airburst high above the intended
target. Chertok's instrumentation proved that the cause was
aerodynamic heating during re-entry which caused the high explosive
warhead to outgas, deform, and trigger the detonator.
As the Soviet missile program progresses, Chertok is a key
player, participating in the follow-on
R-2
project (essentially a Soviet
Redstone—a
V-2 derivative, but entirely of domestic design), the
R-5 (an
intermediate range ballistic missile eventually armed with nuclear
warheads), and the
R-7, the world's
first intercontinental ballistic missile, which launched Sputnik,
Gagarin, and whose derivatives remain in service today, providing
the only crewed access to the International Space Station as of
this writing.
Not only did the Soviet engineers have to build ever larger and more
complicated hardware, they essentially had to invent the
discipline of
systems engineering
all by themselves. While even in aviation it is often possible to test
components in isolation and then integrate them into a vehicle, working out
interface problems as they manifest themselves, in rocketry everything
interacts, and when something goes wrong, you have only the telemetry
and wreckage upon which to base your diagnosis. Consider: a rocket ascending
may have natural frequencies in its tankage structure excited by vibration
due to combustion instabilities in the engine. This can, in turn, cause propellant
delivery to the engine to oscillate, which will cause pulses in thrust, which
can cause further structural stress. These excursions may cause control actuators
to be over-stressed and possibly fail. When all you have to go on is a ragged
cloud in the sky, bits of metal raining down on the launch site, and some
telemetry squiggles for a second or two before everything went pear shaped, it
can be extraordinarily difficult to figure out what went wrong. And none of this
can be tested on the ground. Only a complete systems approach can begin to
cope with problems like this, and building that kind of organisation required a
profound change in Soviet institutions, which had previously been built
around imperial chief designers with highly specialised missions. When
everything interacts, you need a different structure, and it was part of the
genius of
Sergei Korolev
to create it. (Korolev, who was the author's boss for most of the years
described here, is rightly celebrated as a great engineer and champion
of missile and space projects, but in Chertok's view at least equally
important was his talent in quickly evaluating the potential of individuals
and filling jobs with the people [often improbable candidates] best
able to do them.)
In this book we see the transformation of the Soviet missile program
from slavishly copying German technology to world-class innovation,
producing, in short order, the first ICBM, earth satellite,
lunar impact, images of the lunar far side, and
interplanetary probes. The missile men found themselves vaulted from
an obscure adjunct of Red Army artillery to the vanguard of Soviet
prestige in the world, with the Soviet leadership urging them on to
ever greater exploits.
There is a tremendous amount of detail here—so much that some readers
have deemed it tedious: I found it enlightening. The author dissects the
Nedelin disaster
in forensic detail, as well as the much less known
1980
catastrophe at Plesetsk where 48 died because a component of the rocket
used the wrong kind of solder. Rocketry is an exacting business, and it is
a gift to generations about to embark upon it to imbibe the wisdom of one who
was present at its creation and learned, by decades of experience, just how
careful one must be to succeed at it. I could go on regaling you with
anecdotes from this book but, hey, if you've made it this far, you're probably
going to read it yourself, so what's the point? (But if you do, I'd suggest you
read Volume 1 [May 2012] first.)
As with all NASA
publications, the work is in the public domain, and an
online
PDF edition is available.
A Kindle edition is available which is perfectly
readable but rather cheaply produced. Footnotes simply appear in
the text in-line somewhere after the reference, set in small red
type. The index references page numbers
from the print edition which are not included in the Kindle
version, and hence are completely useless. If you have a
workable PDF application on your reading device, I'd go with the
NASA PDF, which is not only better formatted but free.
The
original
Russian edition is available online.
August 2012 